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Logically, Will knows that he is loved.
His mom would do anything for him- has done anything for him. She didn’t sleep when he went missing. She never gave up on trying to find him, even when everyone told her that it was useless, and because of that, she did find him. She walked into hell for him, hauled his body back to the real world. She held him close and wiped a cool rag across his forehead and finger-combed his sweat-damp hair and never flinched away from him, even when a monster’s words started coming from his mouth. Every time the world flashed red and Will’s body lit itself on fire, he knew that when he opened his eyes, his mother would be there at his side. As long as his mom is there, Will is safe. He knows this.
He knows this, he swears it, but he never really feels it. The last time Will felt safe, really and truly safe, was in the Wheelers’ basement on November 6th. Half an hour before he glimpsed a flash of red-grey flesh while biking home. His stomach was full of cheese puffs and lukewarm coke from the stash that Mike kept hidden underneath the staircase, and Lucas and Dustin screeched over Mike’s dramatic narration of the campaign, but the noise didn’t bother Will. The room was a little too warm, a little too loud, and it smelled like unwashed socks, but Will wanted to stay there forever.
Obviously, that isn’t how the story went. Will got on his bike and pedaled himself right into the horror-movie future. Loading the shotgun, huddling in Castle Byers, humming and praying that the monster wouldn’t hear him and his mom would. Hospital stays and white-coated men and blood and fire and the feeling of something inside him that is not him and-
Will tries not to think about it more than he has to. And maybe “horror movie” is a blunt way of putting it. There certainly have been a lot of unexpected upsides to all this, which don’t really fit the genre. Will has a new sister, now, and a new not-dad. And El is wonderful, she really is. Sometimes he feels like they could be twins, separated at birth, just because of the uncanny way she understands him. Maybe it’s because they’ve both been alone in hell before. She’s sharp, and she doesn’t try to coddle him like everyone else.
That’s a terrible thought. He shouldn’t think that about his family and friends. Of course they’re protective of him; he’s a walking liability who drops to the ground and starts seizing or having visions as soon as he’s left alone for two seconds.
And Will is complaining that he doesn’t feel loved at the same time that he’s complaining that his family loves him too much. That makes no sense.
And yet. And yet.
Now, when Will is in a room with Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, it doesn’t feel anything like it used to. Lucas is definitely thinking about Max, and Mike is probably thinking about El, and Dustin is thinking about- well. It’s hard to know what Dustin is thinking about these days. He’s nothing like he used to be. He changed while Will was gone, got colder and harder, and Will’s only guess as to why is the name Eddie that spills out of the others’ mouths in whispers. Gone is the sunshine, the long rambles, the voice of reason, the grin that showed off every tooth. Dustin doesn’t seem to love anyone or anything anymore. Without him, everything feels oddly empty.
Lucas has drifted, too. He disappears for long stretches of time and comes back with bags under his eyes and his hospital visitor sticker still on his chest. It’s Max, Will knows. He’s gone with Lucas a couple times, but it always feels like he’s interrupting something private. The hospital room seems to belong to Lucas as much as it belongs to Max; Lucas has left behind notes taped to the wall and a stack of books and a VHS player with a singular tape and a few packages of crackers, which he has spilled crumbs of on the chair. Lucas reads to her earnestly, like Will isn’t there. Or maybe Lucas just trusts Will to not embarrass him over it. The last time Will came with, Lucas was halfway through The Outsiders. His bookmark was a blue plastic medical glove, stolen from the box hanging on the wall. “Clean,” Lucas had reassured Will, as if that thought had crossed his mind. “I was using some coins, but then I spent them all at the vending machine. And they kept falling out anyway.”
Mike has been weird for a while now. Since Will came back from the Upside Down for the first time, really, but it’s gotten worse every year since. There was a while where Mike wouldn’t touch Will, wouldn’t look him in the eye. It’s gotten a tiny bit better recently- Mike hugged him the other day- but it’s still so different from what they were before. Will really, really doesn’t want to resent El for it. She didn’t change their dynamic on purpose. She doesn’t control Mike’s actions. She even seems to be irritated with Mike most of the time. But a tiny, mean part of Will wishes that she had never dated Mike (or that she had never met Mike at all, but that’s such an awful thing to think that Will immediately stomps it down).
Because Will misses Mike. He really, really misses Mike. He lays on the pullout bed in the Wheeler basement and stares at the ceiling and imagines his legs tangled up with Mike’s, the ghost of the sensation from sleepovers before the time Ted Wheeler came downstairs and saw them and called it improper. The pullout bed is barely big enough to fit Will, but it still feels half-empty without Mike’s gangly limbs star-fishing and pushing Will to the edge of the lumpy mattress. Will would sleep halfway on the floor for the rest of his life if it meant getting to share a bed with Mike again. Will can hardly stand to see Mike anymore. It makes the knife in his gut twist, and he’s breathless. He wants Mike to look at him. But Mike doesn’t look at him, even when Will stares and stares and waits and begs inside his head. And when Mike finally does, the brief eye contact doesn’t magically impart knowledge of Mike’s real feelings into Will’s brain. It’s just kind of awkward, and Will looks away quickly, feeling like he’s done something wrong.
Because obviously, he has, if Mike isn’t hardly looking at him.
Will wishes desperately to feel something. Anything. His mother hugs him and it’s like he’s touching a mannequin. There’s hardly any warmth anymore. He remembers when his heart was unsteady, filled to the bursting by Mike falling asleep on his shoulder at movie night. He remembers looking forward to Dustin’s hugs, where the other boy would purposefully try to squeeze all of the air out of Will’s lungs. He remembers when Jonathan ruffled his hair and his whole body went liquid, trying to lean into his brother’s hand. Now everything means nothing. The house is noisy and Will is alone.
So Will tries to fill the hole inside him. Maybe, instead of being loved, he can make other people feel loved. So he wakes up early to make a pot of coffee and brings a cup of it up to his mom, waking her up right before her alarm goes off. She calls him her sweet boy. He cuts up a piece of cardstock into strips and paints scenes onto each one: a rainbow-crowned waterfall in a mossy green forest, rolling hills covered in California poppies, the dark blue-on-blue of the beach during a storm. The rainbow is too vivid and the texture of the water isn’t convincing, but Lucas looks like he might cry when Will gives him the bookmarks, says that the flowers were- are- Max’s favorite color. It isn’t enough. It’s never enough. Will is still empty and so is everyone around him. He asks Dustin for a hug, and Dustin just pats him on the back stiffly and backs away. The knife twists deeper.
Hopper is sitting on the back porch, cigarette between his fingers in a rare moment of stillness. “I’m sorry if I came into your life too fast, kid,” he says, unprompted. “After- you know.”
“Bob,” Will offers, and Hopper sort of winces.
“Yeah, I guess, but not just him. Lonnie before that, too. You’ve had a lot of people try to be your father. Not all of them good.” Will shrugs in response, and Hopper stops, sucks his teeth like he’s thinking. “I guess- I’m not trying to be your dad, Will. You’re a good kid.”
“Thanks?” Will replies uncertainly, not sure what Hopper is looking for. He isn’t sure how he feels about this conversation, or this topic in general.
“You’re a good kid,” Hopper repeats. “I know your mom raised you just fine. What I’m trying to say is- I’m kind of a shitty dad. And you don’t need me. But…” The man takes a long drag off his cigarette, like he’s buying time to think about what he’s saying. “I really love your mom, kid. I want to be with her for a very long time.”
“Are you asking permission to marry her?” Will asks suspiciously, and Hopper coughs up smoke. The nicotine smells like Will’s mom.
“No. I mean, someday, hopefully, but not at this moment. That would be way too fast. But kid, if at any point, you decide you want someone dad-shaped in your life… I’m here.”
Will tries to consider it. This hole inside him, is it where a father figure should have been? Did Lonnie leave it gaping and empty like the inside of a rotted log? Did it get scraped wider with Bob’s bloodsoaked corpse? He probes around for a moment, but the pain doesn’t get more distinct. “Thanks,” he tells Hopper so that the man doesn’t mistake his silence for rejection. Hopper grunts in response, and returns his attention to his cigarette, apparently out of emotional energy for the day. Will takes the hint and goes back inside, where Joyce frets over his cold ears. Will feels nothing.
Some days are worse than others. Will runs his shower hot enough to hurt, and then worries that it’s burning him because of the Mind Flayer is inside him, not because of the actual water temperature. He asks Nancy to check the water for him because she’s the nearest person who might not pity him. She obliges, but looks at him like he’s a puzzle to solve, and tells him that she thinks the water is fine, but “temperature preference is subjective, isn’t it?”, which is supremely helpful. Then Holly sees Nancy with him and runs to tattle to Mrs. Wheeler, because apparently a boy and a girl shouldn’t be in a bathroom at the same time, and Nancy has to catch Holly and bribe her into silence with gummy bears meant to be given out on Halloween. Then Will is sitting in the bathroom alone again. He shuts off the faucet. There’s too many people under the same roof to waste any hot water.
He likes going with his mom to the Squawk, though. Robin is strange, not at all like Jonathan or Nancy or Steve. She bubbles and spills over herself without any regulation. When she’s just talking, her voice is expressive and loud; she waves her hands around and stares intently at the wall as she speaks, and her tone is always bright, although it’s often sharp with sarcasm. His mom doesn’t seem to know what to make of her, and neither does Will. The current events have dulled down and greyed nearly everyone else, but not Robin. She seems to shine even more. She’s not the best at conversation, but she hosts the radio as easily as breathing. She suggests ideas that are so out of left field that everyone calls her crazy before it sinks in. She is, for lack of a better word, brilliant. And Will, who is otherwise so directionless these days, is inexplicably drawn towards her.
“Hey, Tiny Byers,” Robin greets him.
“Hi, Rockin’ Robin,” Will replies timidly, and she crows a laugh, like it’s the most original thing she’s ever heard. Nonetheless, it loosens Will up. “Anything interesting happening?”
“Boy, have I got a story to tell you,” Robin says, and she’s off, saying something about Steve driving the wrong direction on a one-way street during the last crawl, and an old man who Steve didn’t recognize even though he’s lived in this same small town his whole life, so it must mean that this guy is a government plant or someone’s grandpa that they imprisoned in the attic for nineteen years, and the old guy is just screaming at Steve that he’s going to crash, he’s going to kill somebody, and when Steve guns the engine as much as you can gun the engine on a van like that, the man sticks his bony arms straight up into the air like he thinks he’s gonna be Raptured, and Steve sees him in the rearview mirror as he drives away, standing there like he thinks Jesus Christ himself is gonna greet him with a bear hug-
And with anyone else telling the story, it wouldn’t be funny, but it’s Robin, so it’s somehow hilarious. She shakes her fist and throws her arms up like she’s performing Shakespeare for an audience of one, and Will is somehow reminded of Mike and how he looked when he was DMing back when they were little kids, and he suddenly feels like he belly-flopped into a frigid pool.
Robin cuts herself off and frowns. “Whoa, hey, what just happened?”
“Nothing,” Will says quickly. “What do you mean?”
“You just looked like I kicked a puppy in front of you. Your forehead got all creased.” She squints at him. “Those are some deep forehead creases for a teenager.”
“No, I don’t look like that, and no, they aren’t,” Will argues, perhaps pointlessly. “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
“Uh, I’m no feelings expert, but I think you’re lying.”
“I’ve been with you in this room the whole time, Robin. You were telling a funny story. You can keep going.”
Robin stares at him. It’s not quite a Nancy stare, which usually feels like she’s examining Will’s entire existence, but it is definitely scrutinizing. “No,” she says finally. “I think you went somewhere else in your head. Actually, I think you’re somewhere else in your head a lot of the time. Like, you laugh and smile and nod and everything, and if I asked you to repeat me you probably could, but emotions-wise, you’re not here. Like, you’re keeping part of you locked away.”
“What?” Will asks dumbly. His mind is racing faster than Robin talks, but he can’t seem to catch any coherent thoughts. “Are you calling me insincere?”
“No, no,” Robin laughs. “You’re a really nice person and you mean all the nice stuff you do. You’re just also lying.” Will’s face must reflect the slap that this is, because she backtracks. “Like, Will, what are you feeling right now? In your body?”
Will is so incredibly out of his depth in this conversation. It’s like Robin started talking to the shadows on the wall and expects him to join in, but without pretending. There has to be a right answer here. “...Nothing?”
“You see, you’re saying that, and you believe it too, but it isn’t true. You’re definitely feeling something,” Robin tells him, and then she softens a little. “Don’t worry, I suck at it too. But what do you feel?”
Will takes a breath. His chest rises and falls. He’s suddenly overly aware of the buzz and hum of the machines on the wall, the rasp of air in his throat, Robin tapping her fingers against the stool she’s sitting on. Her fingernails are short and painted with chipped black polish. The heater clanks on. He can’t do it, he realizes. His head is running away from paying attention to itself. The tension in the air is growing, and Robin is just sitting there, waiting. He has to say something.
“My throat,” he starts, and Robin hums encouragingly. “My throat is tight.”
“Yes. And where does that lead?”
“My stomach. It hurts. Oh, God,” he realizes, hunching over a little. The imaginary knife he’s been ignoring for weeks, months, maybe years is absolutely throbbing, and now that he’s paying attention, it’s between his ribs, too, prying them apart.
“Oh, God,” Robin agrees, laughing, and he laughs a bit with her, but there’s a boulder on his chest that he didn’t notice until just now, and he keeps laughing, more and more, almost hysterical.
“I don’t feel nothing,” Will laughs, gasping in air. “I’ve never felt nothing in my whole entire life. Fuck, I’m stupid.”
Whatever is buried inside him aches and aches and aches and it’s blooming like a flower, like blood dripping in water, like a peeled orange with strings of pith hanging off and snagging between his teeth. Will is fucking stupid and he’s so cold and everyone he loves seems to be out of reach and maybe it’s his own fault, maybe he’s the one drifting after all. He wants and wants and never asks for it, just stares at the ceiling and imagines it, yearns for it, like if he thinks about it enough it’ll materialize, like love is something he can hold in his hands, like everything will go back to the way it was and he’ll be a little kid in the Wheeler basement again, and fuck, he has changed, hasn’t he? He’s changed the most of all. He was the one to change everyone else by disappearing off the face of the earth and setting off an infinite ripple effect that created the clusterfuck of a reality they live in now, but maybe if he had left Mike’s house earlier, if he had biked a little faster, things could be the way they should have been. But that wouldn’t have happened. Because there was always going to be a tear in between worlds and the other boys were always going to grow up and start being interested in girls and Will was never going to be the same way. Will is never, ever going to like girls.
He laughs harder at that realization, tears welling in his eyes. He’s always been a crier. Lonnie called him a little wuss, and some other, nastier words, and told him to man up. He was six. No six-year-old has ever been a man. But little Will didn’t understand that, and so that kept growing inside him- why didn’t Lonnie love him? What was Will lacking that everyone else had? And that missing something hasn’t showed up now, still. Will tries to imagine Hopper hurling names at him, sissy, fairy, and keeps laughing at the idea. He can’t decide if it would never fit or if it fits just right. Is he always going to have a home with his mom, now that Hopper is here? Because Joyce loves him, will always love him, but she loves Hopper now too, and Will doesn’t know the conditions of Hopper’s good graces. So Will was just going to sit there and hope that love landed on him like a bee lands on a flower, like sheer dumb luck, like little songbirds perching on his arms and eating seed out of his hands in some kind of Snow White scene, and that’s so stupid, isn’t it? To believe that happiness could be so easy and gentle in a world of monsters? Could require so little work?
No. No, Will is thirsty and he’s been standing there with his chin tilted up, waiting for the rain. He wanted to feel better so badly that he tried to bury the thing that was making him feel bad, but it’s a hundred thousand earthworms writhing in the dirt that is his chest and he could never run away from that, not really, not enough. He’s like the quarters tucked in the pages of Lucas’ book, spilling out onto the hospital floor. He’s himself and he’s the thing inside of him and he’s also not and at some point, that became normal, but it’s not normal, it’s not fucking normal, and he can feel it looking back at him sometimes, like now, like something he needs to spit out. Nothing is ever going to be the same and finally, finally, Will lets go.
“Jesus,” Robin breathes. At some point, she started rubbing his back, small circular motions as his chest heaves and shakes. He can feel the path that her hand has followed. He can feel his pulse in the roof of his mouth. It’s suddenly so quiet.
“I don’t know why I’m this way,” Will croaks, instead of the apology he’d meant to say.
“Well then,” Robin says, that brightness of hers kept carefully small. She’s trying to not be too much for him, he can tell. “I thought I’d broke you for a second there. I was so scared your mom would come in and kill me.”
“I swear I’ve tried to be normal about things,” Will tells her, as if she didn’t say anything. “I didn’t get like this on purpose.”
“Yeah, that’s okay, it’s okay. It really is. We’re all a little fucked-up right now.”
Will breathes out. He feels dirty and clean at the same time, and worn out, a full, bone-deep kind of worn out. It’s like the night he and Jonathan spent building Castle Byers in the pouring rain. Everything, all at once. Will feels everything. Will has always felt everything, even when he made himself forget. “Yeah,” he replies. “Yeah, we are.”